As African children head back to school to face another school year I would like to makean attempt to explain to our community and particularly to young parents why and howthe African child has been systematically mis-educated in the western world during thelast 500 years, so that they can better understand the root causes of some of theaberrations and self destructive forms of behaviour they see in our community and to helpthem realize that if they want a brighter future for their children and for our community,then it is imperative that they no longer leave the education of their children solely in thehands of the western educational system, but rather to follow the advice of Malcolm Xwho told us years ago that “the black child’s education starts when the school bells ringsat 4 p.m in the afternoon.” (This may vary depending on what time school ends in yourcountry) We didn’t follow his advice then and today our youth are suffering theconsequences. The situation of African children around the planet has considerablydeteriorated since the days of Malcolm X, so that we are now forced to follow the adviceof Dr Asa Hilliard one of Africa’s great educators who died recently and left us theseparting words. "The education of African people is an urgent necessity. It is a matter oflife and death. We cannot abide another generation of children who have no identity and

When slavery and later colonization took place the vision that our ancestors had ofeducating and raising African children was taken out of their control and a new way wasimposed on African people. Worse, this new system of education ran counter to theinterests and needs of Africans. As a result, today, as Prof Wilson has again pointed out,African people have never had so many talented and educated economists, educators,sociologists, doctors, lawyers, artists, etc, yet we suffer the worst health, housing, andeducation on the planet because our education was never designed to promote our

Furthermore, our people hold advanced degrees from some of the most prestigious IvyLeague schools and universities and can solve any myriad of problems for other groupsbut since they have not received an African centred education when it comes to their own,all their knowledge is null and void. Sometimes the more educated they become, themore alienated they are from African culture and more of a menace to our group, becausein their zeal to promote the interests of others they often end up doing harm to their own

If African leaders allow the West to take theirwealth to feed Europeans and leave Africans to starve and face death, it is because theytoo have been taught to work against their own interests. For example, at the end ofapartheid instead of putting reparations and land redistribution as a top priority for South

Africa’s black victims, reconciliation with whites, the criminals, became the main goal.

This new manner of raising and educating black children however has always posed aproblem in the western world. Once again, Dr. Wilson gives us an explanation. It isproblematic he says, because African people were not brought to the West to be educated.They were brought to be the slaves and servants of the people who enslaved them, in

other words, to work.

the first question we asked the children was the reason for our people’spresence here in the West. None of them ever responded by saying that African peoplewere here to work as servants for white people. In fact, most black people will answerthis question by a vague “we were brought here as slaves

.” Have you ever noticed thatanything meant for African people is often vague? For example, “Jesus is coming backsoon” or “we are going to reduce poverty in Africa” or “we want to help Africa” Whatdate specifically is Jesus coming back? By what date exactly are they going to reducepoverty and by how much? or what specific area of activity are they planning to focuson? We don’t know. The language is vague because it’s not meant to be taken seriouslyand they know that our people will not demand anything more specific. In return, we are

asked to blindly believe, watch and pray and hope for a better day. Also very, very vague.

Yet what black people actually do is very specific. We serve our white masters. In sportsand in music all the owners are white and the players and singers are black. This

imbalance exists even in countries where the majority of the population is black.

Forexample in the Caribbean most of the business and hotel owners as well as the tourists arewhite, while the workers are mostly black. In Africa, our people extract the diamonds andgold from the ground while Indians, Jews, Lebanese and Western businessmen sit in theiroffices all day and reap the benefits. This inability to understand the real reason for ourpresence in the West has led our community to the false assumption that we are here to‘live in peace and harmony with whites.’ How many times have we heard black peoplesay “they don’t see colour” yet when they move into a white neighbourhood, the whitesmove out, so obviously they do. If we are so mistaken about why we are here and ourrelationship with its inhabitants, is it any wonder that our children and our community are

In 1888, Ernest Renan, a racist French philosopher described Europe’s economic visionof our world when he said, “Nature has given us a race of workers, they are Chinese, arace to till the soil, they are Africans and a race of rulers and soldiers, they areEuropeans”. This is exactly the world we live in today. Yet, this racially organizedeconomic system has existed for the last 500 years but sadly African people are totallyunaware of this fact because they are kept ignorant and uninformed the world over. It isalso this racially segmented economic system which is responsible for the persistentpoverty and underdevelopment in Africa and the other countries where our people reside,but because of our ignorance western propaganda has made us believe that it is becauseour leaders are incompetent and corrupt

. We are meant to transfer our hatred to ourleaders rather than to the racist economic system that Europeans have wilfully put inplace to impoverish Africans. Luckily, the masses of poor people are passive if not therewould be thousands of revolts every day, everywhere on this planet. To keep Africanpeople impoverished the West intentionally bypasses Africa and the ghettos where manyof our people live and invest in the Asian countries. The reason Chinese investment inAfrica today terrifies the West is because they fear it may actually help lift Africans out ofpoverty and thus threaten their racially segmented economic system. To punish theChinese, the West has simply mounted a propaganda campaign accusing them of sellingtainted products and of ignoring human rights in Africa, but when and where in Africahas the West ever respected human rights? In fact, most of the anti democratic leaders in

Corruption in Africa therefore is not the cause of poverty but a consequence of it. Peoplein Africa are corrupt because they do not earn enough money to live decently andtherefore must resort to illegal methods to make ends meet. In fact, where ever you seecrime take a good look, you will usually find high unemployment and intolerable livingconditions because it is a consequence and not the cause. Improve the living conditionsand corruption and crime will quickly disappear. It’s a very simple equation but of courseno one is interested in this option because the capitalist system, which is really the oldRoman slave system under a different name, cannot survive without access to a largenumber of unpaid workers or people who are barely paid. Under globalization, its modernname, 80% of the world is still exploited by the 20% who still continue to own all thewealth. Changing the name periodically (feudalism, industrialisation, capitalism,socialism, communism and now globalisation) is simply a strategy that the West uses tomake us, the ignorant masses believe that there is genuine change taking place in society.Now you understand why every country you visit and in every area of activity the ownersand those who make money are always white or are close to white, while those whowork, serve and are exploited are always black or close to it. This is what African parentsmust begin to understand so that they can explain to their children why African people

Now that we know that African people were brought to the West exclusively to work andserve whites, and not to “live in peace and harmony” with them, where did the rationalebehind the education of black children come from? After Europeans had succeeded inmaking our ancestors almost as ignorant as the animals they said they were after years ofchattel slavery, some of them began to realize that in order to further their commercialinterests, it was better for the ‘negroes’ to have at least a minimal amount of education. Afew continued to believe that “negroes should continue to be worked like beasts ofburden and be kept in total ignorance,” however they finally agreed that it was in theirbest interest to educate our ancestors. In their original plans Europeans had had nointentions of educating African people. The education of the black child in the westerneducational system therefore was never designed to develop the individual personality orthe intellect of African children and to help them reach their fullest potential. Thedecision to educate was strictly based on the economic requirements of the day which

needed a number of educated Africans in order for the West to achieve its goals.

We would still be uneducated today if Europeans had not deemed it a necessaryrequirement. In fact, one of the reasons that African children are doing so badly in theeducational system is precisely because their education continues to depend on the needsof the western economic system. If you listen to propaganda however you may easilybelieve it is because they are intellectually inferior and lazy. The stark reality is that thebusiness world is linked to education and therefore whatever happens in the economicsphere will have an impact on education. The educational system works like a bottleneckto control the flow of students entering the workforce. So, if the economy is experiencinga boom, more students will graduate from college and university in order to enter thework force and if there is a recession, it will do the complete opposite. i.e. fewer students

If we accept that in the western system an individual’s importance depends on theirfinancial worth, then it is clear why African children have become a liability rather thanan asset and are underachieving in school. Knowing the kind of social disruption that ablebodied, young men of working age unable to find a job can create in society, the West hasdecided to channel them into prisons as a solution in order to prevent the kind of revoltsthat occurred in the French suburbs 2 years ago. This is why ‘tolerance zero’ wasintroduced and why a 15 year old African American youth who stole a simple chocolate

After the Europeans had finally decided to educate African children, they had to deal withthe problem of the content of their education. What were they to teach these ‘negroes?’All of the aberrations and self destructive behavioural patterns that we see in ourcommunity can be traced right back to this moment when Europeans had to make adecision about the kind of information they were going to transmit to African people.When African children entered the western school system for the first time, there wasgreat fear among the slaveholders that if Africans were taught ‘the wrong’ information,(the truth) they would lose complete control over them especially since our ancestorsnumerically outnumbered whites in the new world at that time.( African people have

To understand why Europeans were so afraid of the content of African education we mustgo further back into our past. Before they had even set foot in Africa, Europeans hadheard about its glory and its extraordinary civilization. Philip of Macedonia, like thetypical warmongering European megalomaniac, decided that as he was the most powerfulperson in the West he had to conquer Egypt, the most advanced African civilization at thetime and own it for himself. Fortunately, he was killed while waging another one of hisnumerous wars. Unfortunately, his son Alexander, who only a twisted mind could callgreat, decided to fulfil his father’s dream and did eventually conquer Egypt. WhenEuropeans entered Africa for the first time and saw the tremendous civilization ourancestors had methodically collected, stored and preserved from millennia they weremesmerized. They were overwhelmed by its organisation, its opulence, its style, itsarchitecture, its creativity, its intelligence, in short, everything but most particularly, its